Monday, October 22, 2018

Literature Professors: Who Needs Them?

As a college student in the 1980s whose major was comparative literature, I had no choice but to take a course on literary theory: It was required. The smug bloviator who taught it told us that the defining characteristic of the written word was its inability to express meaning. Thea act of writing a novel, which I had previously regarded as a natural process, as organic as breathing, was actually a battle in which words engulfed readers, fuddling our wits and scattering the import of the text. Truth he added, deploying Nietzsche, was a mobile army of metaphor, metonym, and anthropomorphisms--without a general. He himself, he said, would be that general.

Liesl Schillinger 

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